


Triptych

by scribefindegil



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (it's a lot. the answer is a lot), Canon Compliant, Gen, Suicidal Ideation, happy endings, how many metaphors can i cram into one short-form story, narrative causality, the answer may surprise you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 14:58:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6911809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribefindegil/pseuds/scribefindegil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Men like Stanley Pines are born tragedies, and tragedies don’t get happy endings. Two times this was true, and one time, miraculously, it wasn't.<br/>Musings on Stanley Pines' lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triptych

**i.**

There was a man named Stanley Pines, and he was a failure.

He was second-born and second-best, a dead weight, a defective shadow. Even his name was secondhand, and afterthought for a boy who never should have existed.

When he was a child, he and his brother thought they could catch the sun. You know how this story ends. It ends with melted wax and cracked pinions, with a broken body in the sea. You forget that in the story, the instructions are twofold. Don't fly too high or the sun will melt the wax. Don't fly to low or the sea will ruin the feathers.

He'd always been the one that weighed his family down, and when he dragged them too close to the sea out of fear that his brother would fly away without him, they cut him loose. He tried, time and again, with each new state and each new ID, to fix things, but it never stuck. He was brittle newsprint, tearing along the boundaries of any short-lived patches. He was cellulose nitrate, inherently unstable, doomed to self-destruction, to burn himself down and take everything in proximity with him.

Failure grew into him, in the heft of his gut and his unkempt hair and the drifts of losing scratch cards that piled up under the seat of his car. His failure was the only home he had. With every con and every compromise he could feel it heavier around him until it was almost a comfort, until trying to do anything except fail felt about as likely as walking on water. He learned to take punches instead of give them out, to hustle for other people's cons. He learned that if he never asked for anything he couldn't be denied, that if he never set boundaries no one could violate them. He learned everything the hard way.

Some things he never learned. He thought he'd stopped hoping for the sun, and then it flashed before him, and he was too blinded to see that without him as a counterweight, his brother had flown too high and singed his wings. He was the one who burned, and his brother was the one who fell.

He lay there night after night, with his failures branded onto his back and all his other identities burning a hole in his pocket, and eventually he made a decision. It took all his willpower to get out of the car before he turned off the emergency brake and sent it careening down the hill. He told himself it didn't matter that the body they'd find wasn't really his; he'd burnt himself to ash a long time ago.

And Stanley Pines died in orange flames at his own steady hand, slumped across the wheel of a rented car with the last uncaring town reflected in the shattered windshield.

**ii.**

There was a man named Stanley Pines, and he was a liar.

He’d spent his life in his brother’s shadow, and now he stepped forward into the light, into a life that was too big and heavy for him. He stepped into a name that hurt because it was so much like his own, tried to become his own reflection so he didn't have to be himself.

He put on a show, slipped a mask over his face and a coat over his shoulders and silver over his tongue and spun pretty, meaningless lies, and learned how to make a living by showing off things that weren't there. He pulled monsters out of bad puns and worse taxidermy, and then at night he pulled hope out of equations and spun them like plates until he stopped believing his own lies and they smashed onto the floor around him.

Somehow, he kept tricking people into caring about him. No. Into caring about Stanford Pines, Mr. Mystery, a man who didn't exist, a man who was just a distorted fun-house mirror reflection of two brothers who'd tried to touch the sun.

He gambled thirty years' work on the trust of a child, and she gambled the fate of the world, and they won. But he had to keep playing, and for him a big win only ever came before a string of even bigger losses. The losses came: a bruise on his cheek, a promise that his tricks were over and he'd have to go back to being a failure with a dead man's name, a reminder that all he'd ever done was weigh his brother down.

They stung enough that he gambled the world again, on a petty grudge, the world against a “thank you,” and he lost.

His brother told him, hopelessly, what they needed, and he did what he always did: cheat, and raise the stakes.

_For my final trick_ . . .

He stepped forward into the light, in a coat that was too small and heavy for him, and held out his hand. His told himself it didn't matter that his last words, even his final scream, were in his brother's voice. He didn't know what he would have said otherwise.

At least he got to reveal the trick, grin and punch the equilateral bastard out of existence, laugh that the thing thought he cared that he was burning himself to the ground. This was the best con he'd ever pulled, the best thing he'd ever done with his life. In the end, maybe he'd even tricked his family into forgiving him.

And Stanley Pines died in blue flames at his brother’s trembling hand, kneeling slack-jawed on the floor of an impossible building with the end of the world reflected in his borrowed glasses.

*

_In a million universes this was the way things ended. In a million universes, whether it was as a cautionary tale at thirty or as a martyr at sixty, the most important part of this story is that Stanley Pines died. Men like Stanley Pines are born tragedies, and tragedies don’t get happy endings._

_In a million universes this was the end._

_But not in this one._

**iii.**

There was a man named Stanley Pines, and they told him he was a hero.

He was a blank page, his old selves washed out, and his family wrote words of love on him. As they sunk in, he could feel _failure_ and _liar_ lurking underneath like palimpsests. But slowly he learned to overwrite them, learned to be a self that wasn't a hollow shell or a fun-house mirror, that wasn't one step away from self-immolating. His brother smiled and took his arm, and they were a matched set, counterweights, neither of them ghosts or shadows, and together they turned to face the sun.

And Stanley Pines lived.

 


End file.
